Everything is a tradeoff
We are all always a blanket short of a picnic.
It’s not just that football is like a short blanket, as the goatee-toting manager Rafa Benitez was famous for saying, always forcing hard tradeoffs between covering space in attack and defence like a sad camper choosing between a cold head and cold feet. “Real life” is this way too.
The thing Rafa was driving at, the troublesome truth at the end of every rainbow in a world defined by scarcity, is you simply cannot cover every base. If you go all out in attack, pushing everybody into forward areas to increase your own chance of scoring, there’s nobody back to stop the other team taking advantage all the times you run aground.
Flip side, if you park the bus, everybody back barricading the other side’s route to goal, there’s nobody up there to take advantage all the times they run aground.
Every front office’s dream is a squad full of players elite at increasing the likelihood you score and decreasing the likelihood you concede. Such players are vanishingly rare. Messi was not this way, even in his prime. Mbappe is not this way, now during his. Even the richest and most dominant teams need to confront the reality that every player’s game has holes. At almost every position, tradeoffs have to be made at the margin: pick and pay a player who contributes more in attack, or pick and pay a player who contributes more in defence.
Modern football tactics, discovered on the continent and given their fullest expression by economic migrants to the English Premier League, revolve around finding ways to hack one more fraction of a defensive FTE into the attacking structure or one more fraction of an attacking FTE into the defensive structure, and then fine-tuning the balance until the next innovation comes along.
Jose Mourinho broke everyone’s 4-4-2-addled brains by trading his second striker for a third central midfielder, taking more control of whatever the hell it is that happens in the middle of the pitch, against all odds winning the Champions League with a second-rate Porto squad, and parlaying that into decades of being called the Special One with nowhere near enough irony.1
Pep Guardiola is first a dancer, second Jose’s nemesis, and third a genius endlessly troubled by the impossibility of the game he loves providing him with the control he craves. One of his many innovative derivations was moving a full-back into central midfield in possession, freeing up one of the would-be midfielders to go be an attacker without exposing Pep to the fate he considers worse than death: the very possibility of a counter-attack up the middle.2
Mikel Arteta, Pep’s disciple, is first and foremost a sicko. Who wouldn’t be twisted by living through the Banter Years, which he, every other member of Arsenal’s makeshift midfield, and the rest of us, spent having our wellbeing counter-attacked to smithereens?
Then he was exposed to a heavy dose of Pep’s methods as his assistant manager. And now as Arsenal manager he practices never, ever getting counter-attacked with the zealotry of the recently converted.
The upshot is one of the greatest defences that has played the game in the Data Era (and very likely ever), and a discourse dominated by how bad and/or boring the attack is (this season’s third best).
According to betting markets, the balance Mikel has struck is good enough to win the league in about 5000 of our next 10,000 runs through the simulation. Arsenal and Pep City are neck and neck in the title race, strength of schedule favouring Arsenal and injuries favouring City. Arsenal’s net rating of +0.98 expected goals per game comfortably bests City’s +0.78. (Liverpool and Chelsea are next back at +0.47, also compiled on the strength of their defence and attack respectively.) If the mighty Gunners finish top of the xG table and second in the table table, it won’t be the first time, because destiny is just which way the bounces break.
Mikel could ask his uninjured players to prioritize attacking more. But he knows how much he hates being counter-attacked, and he knows he has not discovered a magic way to eliminate tradeoffs. He’s done his damndest with his innovative derivations of set-piece play design, hacking the game in a way that is deeply displeasing to watch, and so effective now everyone is doing it. Beyond the set-pieces, it’s not clear whether he has no new ideas about how to get more players into attacking positions, or whether he is actively choosing not to deploy those ideas because he deems them net-negative.
The classical rich-get-richer political economy of European soccerball means that between them the best teams generally have all the best attackers and defenders, so the marginal tradeoffs show up clearest within the top-right quadrant. In the land of the free and the home of the brave, collectively bargained salary caps mean this dynamic shows up even more clearly up and down major leagues characterized by parity.3
In the Premier League, only weirdo Bournemouth are above average at one end and below on the other. In the NBA, eight of the 20 teams that were trying to win this season fit the bill for top-left or bottom-right quadrant. It’s almost impossible to imagine a Premier League team distinguishing themselves the way the Denver Nuggets did, registering the best offense and the worst defense.
Nikola Jokic, the Nuggets’ superstar, is a goofball, a flawed player, and a flawed leader. He’s both an offensive genius and hard to build around defensively, a combination that was good enough to carry the Nuggets to the title in 2023.4
Luka Doncic is Joker Lite. He’s a below-average defensive player. He’s poorly conditioned as professional athletes go, and devotes too much of his scarce energy to yelling at the refs. Those flaws are enough to keep him out of the very top drawer, but not enough to keep him and his preternatural offensive gifts from having led a highly-flawed Dallas Mavericks squad to a Conference Finals and an NBA Finals between 2022 and 2024.5
Nico Harrison, Mavs General Manager, found himself torn between his superstar player and his belief in the shibboleth that defense wins championships. Eight months after reaching the Finals, he rolled the dice on a decision so shocking nobody believed the tweet was real.
Nico traded Luka and his limitations for some rounding errors and Anthony Davis, a once-elite defender more injury-prone and six years older than Luka whose offensive game fell off a cliff as he slid down the wrong side of the age curve.
Trading a superstar is not on its face insane. You could get another superstar in return, or several stars who are better in the aggregate, or draft picks that have a chance of turning into a future superduperstar. Nico could have caused there to be a bidding war that opened up all these paths. Instead, knowing there would be the backlash to end all backlashes when news broke, he did a secret deal with a GM he was mates with for a player whose jib he liked the cut of.
Six injuries, 31 appearances, and 367 days later, neither Nico nor AD were employed by the Mavs. Ownership relieved Nico of his duties to replace him with someone who would trade away AD’s gigantic contract for salary relief.
That the Luka trade would turn out to be an all-time own goal was predictable and predicted. There was no grand plan or just cause hiding out of sight. There was just a guy forgetting that everything is a tradeoff, that there are no perfect players, and that purity tests in service of shibboleths are almost always a bad idea. When you have one of the best half-dozen players on the planet, for all that doesn’t guarantee you a title, for all that you might wish you had somebody even better, the chances are the alternatives are worse, maybe much worse. Nico’s counterfactual was a fantasy, and not in the good way.
When you start looking at your favourite game as tradeoffs all the way down, it makes more sense. Same goes for the workings of the “real world”. Few easy fixes. No free lunch.
You see it in every failure to build something good that lasts, every promising project derailed by not resisting the temptation to self-impose impossible purity tests. It’s there in every failure to balance competing priorities, every party pandering to their base and losing the electorate. There in every failure to prioritize at all, every government trying to please everyone and achieving next to nothing.
Gawd help us. Rafa was more right than he ever knew.
Auction deadline day has been and gone, your bids are in, and next time out the Blog will be coming to you under a new name.
Thank you to everybody who was brave and kind enough to play along.
Training data
📺Benitez’s blanket analogy! (2017). 13 years after arriving in England he was still patiently explaining this to people who despite their profession being built around asking questions prefer not to hear an answer more complicated than “just try harder and be better at everything”.
🎵Star Treatment (2018). “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes / Now look at the mess you made me make / Hitchhiking with a monogrammed suitcase / Miles away from any half-useful imaginary highway.”6
📝Luka Doncic Is a Los Angeles Laker, (Un)explained (2025). Shot.
📝The Anthony Davis Trade Is the Disaster Dallas Needed (2026). Chaser.
📝My simplistic theory of the left and right (2026). Simple, but effective.
There’s another post hiding inside this one, about how some coaches are hedgehogs who ride the one thing they know for as long as they can, and others are foxes, whose flexible frameworks are adaptable to evolving environments.
There was a time when people in good standing thought they could get away with saying Pep was a fraud, on the basis he’d only ever won absolutely everything while managing the GOAT (Messi) or the richest team in a one-team league (Bayern Munich). That he was not in fact a fraud was predictable and predicted.
We’ll save for another day the depravities of and opportunities to learn from a ruleset that incentivizes 10 teams in a 30-team league to intentionally lose as many games as possible.
It’s working out less well for the Nuggets in this season’s playoffs, currently 3-1 down to the more normie and more injured Timberwolves in their first-round series. Nothing lasts forever.
To be clear, the very top tier is also populated by players with flaws. Steph was targeted on defense throughout his prime. Young LeBron couldn’t shoot, and by the time he learned he’d slowed down. Jordan’s off-court antics make Luka look like a choirboy.
“...Back down to earth with a lounge singer shimmer.”